Did you recently get a new computer for the upcoming school year? Find out how to protect your investment from inadvertently downloaded malware (malicious software).

Malware can cause your computer to run slowly or possibly not even run at all.

If you use Office 2003, you might have heard quite a bit about the "ribbon" when it first appeared in Office 2007. Maybe it scared you off. Maybe you heard great things. Maybe you never paid attention to it until now, because you've recently upgraded to Office 2010.

If you're new to the ribbon, then you should read the full post. I've pulled together three great resources that can help you navigate the switch. Take a look and let me know what you think.

In this video, I’ll show you how to drag a PowerPoint presentation into OneNote and take notes next to the slides.

Find out more about how OneNote and PowerPoint are better together!

--Jennifer Bost

Connecting teachers and students can be a tricky business. Hopefully, you teach and they learn. But unless you have the perfect dynamic between teachers and students, there's often a gap between what you're trying to get across and what they're actually picking up. How do you know which students are getting it, and which ones are falling behind? What if you could insert questions into your presentation, and then get instant feedback? Or maybe mark up your slides, and have those notes appear in a OneNote notebook for students?

To find out more and to download the add-in, read the full post.

Does your name appear as a spelling mistake in Word? You're not alone. As part of our Call-to-Action campaign, I recently asked our Microsoft Student Facebook friends to share their Word pet peeves. And this pet peeve was top of the list. Luckily, there's a quick fix. Add your name to the spell check dictionary.

Here's a quick video showing you how. Of course, these steps work for adding any word to the dictionary not just your name. For example, if you're using special technical terms or acronyms in your document.

Find more helpful links and information in the full blog post.

Last month I attended the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) 2011 conference in Philadelphia. For three days I worked the booth and walked the halls listening to the questions that teachers and school IT professionals were asking.

Get the scoop on what we were demonstrating at the Microsoft booth. If you weren’t able to attend ISTE and have a question, feel free to post your question as a comment on this blog. I’m interested to hear what technologies have piqued your curiosity.

Get inspired by examples of how schools customized SharePoint to deliver community flyers, promote faculty achievements, support a distrcit-wide online calendar for parents, and create class Web sites for teachers and students.

In this collection of posts and videos you can watch testimonials and see real SharePoint solution designs and logic architecture plans.

Read my full blog post for details. 

If you find yourself banging your head on your desk when it comes time to sort and filter student data in your grade book, Excel tables can make your life less stressful. Tables let you sort  test scores (for example, from lowest to highest), calculate average scores on assignments, and add special formatting to your spreadsheet. Converting your existing grade book into a formatted table is quick and easy. You supply the student data, and Excel does the heavy lifting.

This video will get you started. If you want to get more in-depth, there's an entire training course devoted to Excel tables.

If you want to learn more about Excel, take a look at the Microsoft Excel blog.

--Matt Shelton

With Office Web Apps all of your students can use Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Excel for their school assignments... for free! Files are viewable, editable, and sharable virtually anywhere there's an Internet connection.

You'll find helpful and informative videos and downloadable step-by-step instructions to guide you through creating a new document, setting up a shared folder in Windows Live SkyDrive, printing a document from the browser, and more.

Read the full blog post for details on how you can incorporate Office Web Apps into your curriculum.

With Office Web Apps and Windows Live SkyDrive you and your team members can rock out a great group project without meeting in person all of the time. Windows Live SkyDrive gives you 25 gigabytes of FREE online file storage! Why not cash in on that? Just save your files to a shared folder on SkyDrive and give your team members access. 

Watch this short video to see how easy it is to create a SkyDrive folder, upload files, and use Office Web Apps. Read the full post for details.